Hello, this topic title sounds silly, but there's something i've always wanted to do: In TA modifying unit or weapon properties was wonderfully simple. I remember for guided weapons you had properties which would modify the tracking speed, in degrees a second, and other things like accleration, burn time (if it was a missile) and things like that I tried once the isguided=1 or whatever it was with a light laser turret, and changed the line drawn to be 4 seconds (so instead of a little line, it'd be one long line to the target). Didn't work. In the mod Final Frontier, there was point defense lasers, which technically were missile launchers, the projectiles they fired just looked like a laser pulse. The main reason being that lasers as they couldn't be guided would miss the target, and making them fast would just make them overshoot their target. They don't have to be called lasers. I just want some curvy lines that follow things. I've looked through hours of incubation footage (battle isle tatical shooter) to find the multi-target destroyer alternate animation. But you can imagine a curved line going towards the target.
but lazherz shoot straight! You can't have a bent one, it would make my brain hurt. however I can more easily imagine electrical discharges in the from of lightning, which follow a more erratic path. If you had some sort of Tesla device that might work, and could target multiple units, and look cool as hell
yeah, I also tried it with lightning, because back in the TA days you had all sorts of render types. The plasma/bullets were these little things that'd fluctuate in size and they could be guided. Just not lazerbeams. Thing about the lightning in TA was it took a straight line path to the target, wheras real (Forgive me for bringing realism into this) lighting would arc and flail around until it found a ground path. Now, i did hear a story about using a laser pointer to ionise a channel of air, which would funnel the lightning down it and that sounds pretty cool. I just would like the capability of curving death rays. That's the term. Death rays. There, now it doesn't have to be a lazer beam with all the conceptions of lasers. It's a beam of death (dum dum DUM) that seeks out it's target.
I also like the idea - it would look really cool - but it's sadly not something that the forums really decide. The forums are for minimap discussions, deciding about how logistics work, and really important stuff like game play mechanics. That is something that the designers decide, not us. But I do agree with you, it would look really neat.
Lmao this reminds me of so many sci-fi animes. The ships with the 30 tube "laser/Beam" barrages that fire vertically then go absolutly everywhere :lol: Personally i just hope we have normal beam weapons. For all intents and purposes a curving laser is just a bolt weapon (guided or otherwise) with a very long effects trail. I am not really sure how you would code a continuous style beam weapon to curve and still calculate constant impact events along it... Would definatly be something cool to see code for though @bobucles: Technically in the PA enviroment it might be useful... Consider we are playing on spheres and on some of the smaller planets the ground curve will potentially be sharp enough to directly effect the max range of a normal beam.
Point is, instant hit beam weapons are COMPLETLY different from projectile weapons. Beam weapons make a single LoS test and they hit within a single frame of the simulation. A projectile however needs to test for collision with other entities in every single frame whereby the movement between two frames is approximated as a straight line. If you try to create some type of arced, yet instant hit beam, then you would need to forcefully add points in between on the arc to ensure an accurate collision detection. This however, is not he default behavior for homing projectiles, so even if you allegedly recreated the desired behavior by giving a projectile infinte speed, it would not have worked as desired. Cosmetically yes, since the rendered arc is interpolated. But the collision detection would not have used the same arc.
Yeah, and I was pleased to see in supcom there was instant lasers, so it's possible. But I mean slow moving beams of light. That curve as they seek their target. I'm not saying it's needed by any means, it just looks cool and trippy, and it's one of those things that if it was supported, would make me very happy. I appreciate this is not 1997 anymore, but if each unit and weapon had a simple to edit text file with the majority (or hey, even all of them.) of their respective properties I'd be happy to. It was so easy to just edit TA and make the additions I wanted to it. Primarily longer ranged, cheaper LLT's, making them a useful early game defense that was still useful later on.
I Definitely haven't read enough of this thread to comment. But the refractive nature of an atmosphere naturally curves lazers. I doubt they'd include such complex physics into the game, but it would be interesting to think about, since you have the worst line of sight on small planets and the lack of atmosphere would make lazers useless, but on big planets with heavy atmospheres, where you'd have the longest line of sight AND lazers that naturally curve, they would become wildly dominant in comparison. Why let them curve? So I can shoot beyond the horizon!
Sounds like you are describing a seeking missile that looks like a laser shot? Anyway the look of something and how it behaves are fairly separate here so go to town
if we're talking about arcing energy, why not a "solar flare gun" that uses magnetic fields to arc plasma towards the target? http://ircamera.as.arizona.edu/NatSci10 ... lflare.gif
